


Love You Forever

by sburbanite



Series: Hearts and Homes [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Immortality, M/M, Meteorstuck, Mild Smut, POV Second Person, Romantic Fluff, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 06:22:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5323841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sburbanite/pseuds/sburbanite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave will always love him, even if he can't love himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love You Forever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reinkist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reinkist/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Going Home](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5321969) by [reinkist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reinkist/pseuds/reinkist). 



> This one pushed me over 1000 Kudos <3  
> Thank you all so much!

You’re slow to realize. Embarrassingly slow. So much so that your sister sees it before you do. Her girlfriend sees it; even your pair of beautiful, grinning tormentors see it. Eventually, you notice the way you can’t stop staring at him, and you can’t use your shades to hide from yourself. The only one who doesn’t see it is him. Unaware of your gaze, he moves like a dog, terrified of life’s next inevitable kick. Nervous anger fuels him, drawing you closer even as he pushes everyone away. You want to take him to pieces, clean out the insecurities from his mechanisms and remove the unbearable tension from his springs. You wonder if you’re good enough to put him back together. Karkat Vantas is broken, but he’s the most beautiful person you’ve ever met. Other people might see a spiky bundle of fury and fatigue, but you catch the little moments when he blows gently on a cup of coffee, his face relaxed. When he has his head buried in a romance novel, the little smile on his face melts something inside you. When you do something totally idiotic, sticking spoons to your face or demonstrating your terrible break-dancing, his sharp little laugh is worth a billion boonbucks.

He’s the closest thing you’ve ever had to a real-life best friend, but you’re pretty sure it isn’t normal to study the contours of your best friend’s face. It definitely isn’t in the dudebro handbook to watch his ass so intently when he walks away. You hope he doesn’t notice. Part of you really wishes he would. He recoils each time your hand brushes his, each time you lean over his shoulder to see what he’s reading. You apologize over and over, until he tells you to shut the fuck up. He’s sick of hearing that word, he doesn’t mind as long as you stop creeping up on him like a tool. You tell him no promises. He hits you with his book.

\----------------------------------------------------

If you studied him when he was still post-SGRUB shaky, when he spent every minute blaming himself for the death of his friends, then you downright _admire_ him now. The meteor has softened him, the hours of meaningless dicking around eroding his defences. These days, he lets you in, lets you close. Close enough to see the way his bangs fall into his big yellow eyes, the bags beneath them fading to nothing as he gets more sleep. As you gently berate him into taking care of himself. He puts on weight, adding layers of muscle to his whip-thin frame now he knows he’s not going to die, at least for a while.

Being close to him is an exquisite torture. He still doesn’t see your eyes follow him wherever he goes, like you’re a creepy puppet or a renaissance masterpiece. He can’t fail to notice you smiling more often, though. He melts your façade without meaning to. Days without him are unbearable tedium. Karkat still tells you to fuck off occasionally, but now he does it with a smirk on his face. You’re glad he doesn’t seem to mind you babbling at him. You don’t know what you’d do if he decided he’d had enough. His movies are dumb and you tell him so, but he’s always ready with compound expletives so creative that you can’t help but giggle like an idiot. You spend most movie nights watching the light dancing on his face, anyway.

\----------------------------------------------------

The first time he touches your hand intentionally, you have to force yourself not to pull away. His touch is electric, and the movie might as well stop playing there and then. Karkat’s hand is rough and callused, but his touch is gentle. Grasping his hand in the dark feels right, it feels downright wonderful. You wonder what touching the rest of him would be like. That thought makes the hand in his start sweating, and he grins. Maybe the beautiful little shit has finally realized why you keep curling up next to him. Why you’ve watched all those terrible rom-coms. You want to kiss him, have wanted to for months, so you do. You wish it was as simple as that sounds. You can’t breathe, can’t think, frozen in the moment as you lean in toward him. He’s surprised, his breath catching in his throat, and for a split second all you can think is FUCK. You reincarnate as a sex-god when he kisses you back. You’re no longer Dave Strider, awkward teen. Now you’re Dave Fucking Strider, makeout king. And you’re the luckiest bastard on the meteor because Karkat is letting you kiss him. His lips are softer than you’d imagined and hotter than you’d dared to hope. He breathes you in, kissing with a passion you’ve only seen him express about turgid romances. Fuck, this is getting pretty damn turgid. It’s the first time you’ve ever been glad he taught you that word.

\----------------------------------------------------

He’s actually yours. You tell yourself each morning, revelling in the feeling of his skin against yours. He’s not a morning person. Neither are you, but unlike him you don’t sleep past noon. Once he was a twitchy insomniac, but in your bed Vantas can’t seem to get enough sleep. You don’t care, it just gives you more opportunities to watch his gorgeous face. Sleep irons out the remains of his stress, the stubborn self-loathing that even you can’t seem to shift. With his cares gone, you get a glimpse of the Karkat that could have been if he’d grown up somewhere kinder. If he hadn’t had to fear for his life since he was old enough to know what his blood-colour meant. If he hadn’t had to lead a team of homicidal teenagers through his species’ personal apocalypse. You wish you could do for him what sleep does.

Later, after accidentally waking him with the noise from your phone camera, you tell him how fucking hot he is. You don’t think he listens, but he definitely feels the way your hands trace every inch of his body. He moans softly as you fist his sweat-damp hair, pornographically when you guide him inside of you. You gasp his name over and over, interspersed with garbled assurances of how hot he is, how wonderful, how much you want him all the time. He grins, taking devilish enjoyment from the way you come undone.

You want to bottle the look in his eyes as he fucks you, keep it with you always. His face is so open, his hunger as naked as he is. You don’t tell him that you love him, not yet, even though it’s fucking tempting when he shudders his release and that angelic calm overcomes him again. Inevitably, you tell him for the first time during your next round of sex, the next day. He yells at you for being unromantic, but he can’t hide his smile. He says it back, smirking, when you bring him coffee in bed.

\----------------------------------------------------

Watching him cooking is your new favourite thing. He sucks at preparing human food, but he listened carefully when you showed him how to fry the alchemized bacon and he'll be damned if he needs any more help. If you can do it, he can do it. You end up with burned, crunchy breakfast, and he almost believes you when you tell him you like it extra-crispy. You kiss him with a mouth tasting of butter and smoke, and remember that your old favourite thing is pretty amazing too. 

Every time he catches you looking at him, he asks you why. He shrugs off your not-so-smooth replies; he's hotter than the green Sun, more gorgeous than an angry angel, he's got a butt that won't quit. You smile as he asks less and less, answering your gaze with a tentative smile instead. You make sure he believes how much you adore him when you tease your hand over his bulge, not letting him feel you inside him until he admits how attractive he is. He'll always agree with you if you're patient enough.

\----------------------------------------------------

He cries into your shoulder as you hurtle toward uncertain death. The new session bears down on you both like a freight-train, headlights freezing both of your hearts. He tries to push you away; he’s sure he’s going to die. Screaming arguments build like thunderheads, releasing in painful jabs at your immortality, his irrelevance, his weakness. You make things worse by insinuating he'll be telling you to check your god-tier privileges next. Even you can tell he's doing all of it because he doesn’t want it to hurt if he dies. He’s an idiot if he thinks that’s going to work. Gradually, all of the confidence drains out of him, breaking him down into a quivering wreck again. You’re shit-scared too, two teenagers who’ve been tasked with saving a universe. You don’t want to live in a universe without him in it. Neither of you mention the tears during sex, the way you grip each other too tightly in your sleep. You tell him that you love him over and over. You tell him everything will be OK. He doesn’t believe it, and neither do you.

\----------------------------------------------------

His face twists with rage and fear as he beats clawed fists on your chest. He screams his anguish because he thought you were dead, you fuckhead. He thought he was alone and he’d have to spend eternity without you. Eventually, the anger fades as he exhausts the reservoir of energy inside him. His tears are so much worse than the yelling. You try to comfort him with humor, complementing his shiny new god-tier wings and cape that matches yours. You two are the baddest motherfuckers this side of paradox space, the ultimate power-couple, even if one of you does look like a fairy. He replies with a slap hard enough to make your ears ring. 

Later, when he’ll speak to you again, he explains how it felt when you didn’t come back. When he woke from his enforced nap to find you missing, and felt his heart tear in two. He'd kicked a spur of crystal hard enough to break two toes on his right foot. 

You fold him into your arms in reply, sobbing apologies into his new cape. You're sorry, so fucking sorry, you love him and you need him and you can't live without him and you'll make it up to him even if it takes the rest of eternity. He gently pulls you away, stroking your hair and forgiving your stupid heroic ass even though you don't deserve it. He looks like shit, eyes blooshot and hair like he's combed it with a hedge, but he's never been more fucking beautiful to you. Your one and only. You tell him so and he laughs, and berates you for getting snot on his cape. The two of you walk into the new universe hand in hand, bound together for as long as your love lasts. 

You've got eternity to love him. You hope you're enough.


End file.
